What starts as joyful excess flattens out into dulled habit, and finally slow
self-destruction.

Look, I know that we now hear the words “binge-drinking” and “obesity” intoned so often that they have simply become a plaintive background muzak to our daily life, a little boogie of guilt shimmying around our bad habits. The temptation is to ignore it, and pour a large glass of rioja with a generous serving of crisps on the side.

But it really is getting serious. It’s not just that we’re gently swelling into jolly plump folk and tipsy merrymakers, of the kind that litter our history and literature, regulated by the rhythms of the feast-day or the inn. The booze and fatty grub have got out of hand. We’re shovelling them down like there’s no tomorrow, and in many cases there won’t be, because they’re ganging up and doing us in. In a growing number of extreme cases, our exhausted livers are packing up. Deaths from liver disease rose by 25 per cent between 2001 and 2009, with causes attributable to excess alcohol, obesity and hepatitis. Ninety per cent of such deaths are among those under 70, with a significant proportion of fatalities in the forties.

By now, most of us – with just a little contemplation – know our way round the machinery of the problem. Most people are eating far too much sugar, salt and fat, and moving around too little. The younger ones are binge-drinking, floating through the pubs and clubs on a sea of cheap spirits. The older ones are regularly consuming well above the advised limit, downing three or four large glasses of sauvignon to “relax” once the children or grandchildren are in bed. A quarter of all the people in England are now officially obese, rather than simply overweight.

It was William Blake who said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, but I think he meant occasional bursts of ecstatic hedonism, not sitting in front of Britain’s Got Talent steadily working your way through a deep-pan pizza, two bottles of wine and a family-size bar of Dairy Milk.

Yet why has it become so difficult for large swaths of people to prevent themselves from eating and drinking to the point of self-destruction? Perhaps this is simply what happens in the absence of war or famine, when food and alcohol are accessible and abundant: a high number of people are simply fated to keep chasing those little dopamine hits until it leads them to an early grave. The question then is, why does everyone not do the same?

A large part of me instinctively understands binge-drinking fatties. When I first had the money and opportunity to eat and drink to excess in my twenties, on receiving a monthly salary, that’s what I did: breakfast was a ketchup-laden sausage and bacon buttie at about 10.30am, followed by a lunch with lavish amounts of white wine and chips, an afternoon snack on something sweet, and a large, late dinner.

Having always been skinny, it came as a shock to find that I was putting on weight. I had never really made the link between calorie intake and poundage before. When I detailed to my mother what I was eating, she said: “It’s a wonder you’re not 40 stone,” and I made efforts, spurred by vanity, to return back towards normal. The drinking was reduced, although I was getting a bit bored with it anyway, once I had children, and realised that 5.30am starts in the company of tiny people with squeaky voices were not compatible with a hangover: it was like a headachey Dorothy being mobbed by Munchkins.

Yet there is still something that wearies me about those bony exercise nuts who can bang on for hours about the intricacies of their gym routine. They’ll live longer than everyone else, but I expect that those around them will be actively grateful to go first.

Yet had I carried on at the same rate, I would be twice the size I am now, and quite possibly imprisoned in a leaden version of myself from which it would feel impossible to wriggle free. This is what happens, I think. What starts as joyful excess gradually flattens out into dulled habit, and finally slow self-destruction. As the damage builds up from a given activity, the pleasure slowly leaks out, but the resulting depression stubbornly clings to the ruinous behaviour. You can certainly tinker with pricing and supply, as the Government is doing, or you can encourage food companies to cut the calories in their products, as the Department of Health did yesterday. But the truth is that problem drinking and obsessive gorging are fuelled by a deeper psychological malaise that looks for solace in consumption, and, finding little, consumes yet more in restless unhappiness. The ranks of casualties are being killed by pleasures that they no longer even really enjoy.

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I found myself bristling last week in defence of Walsall, the town in the West Midlands which – so newspapers gleefully reported – is so grim that a clutch of residents in temporary council accommodation in Croydon flatly refused to live there even when they were offered permanent homes. Cue much chortling about what one critic called “the ugliest town in the world”.

I live in London, but I am familiar with Walsall, as my in-laws live there. It has a brilliant art gallery, with contemporary exhibitions and works by Van Gogh and Lucian Freud. It is the birthplace of the strikingly elegant supermodel, Erin O’Connor. The people take time to be friendly, and you can buy beautiful houses with handsome gardens for prices that would make a Londoner weep tears of angry disbelief.

Perhaps I am more sympathetic since I grew up in a city that no one wanted to move to. Belfast may be chic and cosmopolitan now, but in 1980 it boasted a single, lonely Italian restaurant and the Europa hotel, then cheerily billed as “the most bombed hotel in Europe”. Yet, aside from its glaring local difficulties, it always seemed to me to have a singular character and gritty charm.

I suspect the Croydon residents didn’t want to move simply because they have a social network where they are, and Walsall has relatively high unemployment. Perhaps it’s time to stop sneering at Walsall, and invest in it instead.

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Imagine you’ve just left school, have a bit of catering experience, and a three-year university course seems rather a chunky debt to take on with no guarantee of a job. So here’s my advice: apply to be a trainee butler for the Queen. The starting salary of £15,000 a year for 45 hours’ work a week might not be much, but think of the perks. Board, food and bills are all gratis, you receive on-the-job training and, thanks to last week’s Budget, from next April precisely £9,205 of your salary will go untaxed.

Consider, too, the long-term prospects. The Americans are going crazy for Downton Abbey, buying tote bags and thongs that bear the question: “What Would Lady Mary Do?” Certain families would no doubt pay a handsome salary to anyone with a reference from Buckingham Palace who could regularly supply them with what felt like the correct answer. Perhaps it might be better to ignore the somewhat lurid example of Diana, Princess of Wales’s former butler, Paul Burrell, who became the very soul of indiscretion – but with sufficient wit and the gentle exercise of British hauteur, I have a feeling the right butler could clean up, and not just the household silver.